Familiars, Spell Effects, and Auras

Spiritual Weapon, Wall of Fire, Spirit Guardians, and an owl familiar are four different things on a battle map, and Far Table treats them as four. The kind decides where the piece lives in the turn order and who pushes it around.

The four kinds

• Aura. A circle of a set diameter in feet, drawn around the caster's own token in the caster's color, on every connected device. It is a property of the caster, not a separate creature, so it follows the token wherever it goes and there is nothing to drag. Spirit Guardians.
• Static shape. A fixed drawing on the map, bound to a caster by name. Wall of Fire sits where it was cast. No turn, no card of its own.
• Movable spell-effect token. A token that moves on its own, with its own movement speed and its own movement budget separate from the caster's. Spiritual Weapon and Flaming Sphere. It rides on the caster's turn rather than getting one.
• Familiar. A full combatant with its own initiative number, its own tracker card, and its own turn.

Auras, static shapes, and movable tokens appear as small labeled sub-chips tucked under the owning character's tracker card. Familiars do not. They get their own row in the turn order, like anyone else.

The player's side: acting as

If you own one of these pieces, tapping the chip under your card switches you into acting as it. Movement and dice rolls then belong to that creature: the movement string you drag moves the spell token, the movement budget you see is its own, and a photographed attack roll lands on the table labeled with its name, not your character's. Tap the chip again, or your own card, and you are back to yourself. Exactly one of you is live at a time.

While you are acting as the token, its chip fills solid in your color with an ACTING tag. Acting as yourself, your own card wears that tag next to On turn instead.

Two rules to know:

• The switch is a request, not a direct change. Your tap goes to the DM's device, which checks that it is your character's turn and that you own the piece before it takes effect on everyone's screen. An invalid request is dropped.
• Familiars switch on their own. When your familiar's initiative comes up you are acting as the familiar automatically, and any stale spell-token choice is discarded.

The first time a chip appears on your card, the app explains it once: that chip is a creature you control, tap it to move and roll as them.

The DM's side

All four are added mid-fight by the DM, from the + Token control. On a Mac or Windows machine that is the Add menu in the top toolbar; on a phone or tablet the same form mounts inline inside the combat tracker.

Pick the Owner first, from a dropdown of the characters currently in the fight; with only one, the owner is filled in for you. Then pick the type and fill in what it needs:

• Aura: a name and a diameter in feet.
• Static shape: a name only, plus a shape you have already drawn with the area-of-effect (AoE) tool.
• Movable token: a name and a movement speed, with optional token art.
• Familiar: a name, an initiative number, a movement speed, and optional token art.

Static shape has an order of operations. Draw the shape first, then add it, and the app promotes your most recent drawing and binds it to the new combatant. Submit without one and you get told: "Draw the spell shape with the AoE tool first." Chapter 27, AoE Shapes and Mid-Combat Additions, covers the drawing tools.

Tapping a chip on the DM's side opens a short action sheet rather than switching you into the creature. A static shape offers Remove from map. A movable token offers Place on map, Reposition on map, and Remove from map, and one you have not placed yet also shows a "Long press to place" hint in the combatant panel. To clear an aura, select the caster's token and tap the × on the aura row in that panel. Removing a static shape's combatant deletes its linked drawing too.

Platform honesty

Binding a static shape to a caster is a Mac and Windows feature. The phone and tablet form drops that option, because the form and the map cannot share a small screen well enough to draw and bind in one pass. On a phone the DM leaves the Wall of Fire as a plain AoE drawing with no combatant attached. It looks the same to the table; it just has no name on the tracker and no chip to remove it by. Auras, movable tokens, and familiars work everywhere.